[HN Gopher] We need to rewild the internet
___________________________________________________________________
We need to rewild the internet
Author : robin_reala
Score : 221 points
Date : 2024-04-16 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
| urda wrote:
| More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to
| have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the
| odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such
| detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always
| "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this
| should be everyone's place to be free.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I feel like letting my geek flag fly / Yes, I feel like I owe
| it to someone
| __________ ____\ /
| | __ _| / | | |\ \
| | _____\ |________\
| | | |
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Almost uninstalled Linux / It happened just the other day
| dhosek wrote:
| Points for the CSNY deep cut reference.
| fsckboy wrote:
| for CSNY "Almost Cut my Hair", 1970?
|
| may I please have points, too sir?
|
| Jimi Hendrix "If 6 was 9", 1967: "If all the hippies cut
| off all their hair I don't care, I don't care... White
| collar Windows users, flashin down the street pointing
| their plastic finger at me, hoping soon my kind will drop
| and die: I'm gonna wave my freak flag high!"
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| I was just thinking today that I should just start posting my
| stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc.
|
| It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry
| about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug
| from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
| digging wrote:
| I don't really share anything I make/do on the internet but
| I've found posting my photography on a personal site feels
| pretty good even if I don't expect anyone to ever see it
| there. Recently I made a /now page and even started blogging
| infrequently - again, there are likely 0 viewers, but there's
| some pride in knowing I've staked out a corner of the
| internet for myself.
| ozim wrote:
| I think everyone is done with influencers.
|
| People would like to find genuine ones instead of just cash
| grabs.
| criddell wrote:
| I've thought about building personal site, but the
| opportunity cost is just too high. The time I spend making a
| site has to come from somewhere and there just isn't anything
| I do that I want to take time from.
| jstanley wrote:
| Don't take it from the time you spend doing something you
| care about. Take it from the time you spend doing nothing.
| criddell wrote:
| The time I have set aside for me to do nothing is my most
| valuable time! I'd rather take it from just about
| anything else
| II2II wrote:
| A personal site should be personal, in the sense that the
| things you share are things you value and the only value
| derived from it is from sharing what you value with
| other. That's why personal sites are the ones that are
| easy to tell apart. Personal should be personal,
| otherwise it is simply trying to establish a professional
| profile.)
|
| Of course, if you have no interest in sharing your
| passions, don't do it. Your free time is valuable and you
| should only use it for things that you value.
| sojournerc wrote:
| One hour with Hugo (and netlify) and you have a site, come
| on...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Yes, but does it give you the validation you deserve as a
| member of society?
| Vrondi wrote:
| Nobody is owed validation. We want it, but we are not owed
| it. Learning to cope with that desire is one of the chief
| signs of maturity and wisdom.
| autokad wrote:
| I remember when they were on the agenda path to eliminate gifs.
| You'd see posts on hacker news written by Giffy, a company
| seeking to make its existence justified by getting rid of gifs,
| all over hacker news.
|
| When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to
| control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can
| download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted
| into oblivion.
|
| One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news
| by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you
| got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a
| disadvantage.
|
| You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in
| the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and
| you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally
| is.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| It's the opposite. Being contrarian is free karma, generally.
| The downvotes come from picking unpopular positions, whether
| you're wright or wrong. I used to get downvoted a lot when
| talking to people about privacy, but now those sorts of posts
| get upvotes. Times and prevailing opinions change
| crooked-v wrote:
| That stuff is still around, it's just on Discord and VRChat
| now.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| Then it isn't around. It's walled off. And it will disappear.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Do you spend your life reading 20yo blog posts? Just live
| the moment with the opportunities it gives you
| dhosek wrote:
| Sometimes. I stumbled across somebody's 20+-year-old
| collection of deep musical analyses of early Chicago
| songs. That same material on
| Twitter/Facebook/Discord/whatever is going to be
| inaccessible.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my
| paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I
| don't much care for it when I don't have anything else
| occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't
| really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some
| nuance and complexity that makes them worth another
| listen.
| 1shooner wrote:
| I think the point is that passively feeding your content
| to a profit engine actually limits your opportunities vs
| a modicum of agency over how you want to share your
| knowledge and experiences. If you honestly don't care
| about anything beyond your tiktok feed, that's fine, but
| there is interest out there in a longer time envelope of
| cultural production.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| A forum for my car just went dark. Gone are not quite 20
| years of posts and discussions that I've searched many
| times over while troubleshooting mine or in preparation
| for some job that needed to be done.
|
| I made this discovery after going to post a novel
| solution for getting into the hood with a seized hood
| release in hopes that it might spare someone else some
| trouble in the future.
|
| All things are not in the moment. Sometimes it's good to
| learn from the past.
| Vrondi wrote:
| The current moment is great if you never need to find an
| old book, fix an old car, fix an old house, identify an
| old variety of plant, or any of a thousand other things.
| Basically, if you have no other interests,
| responsibilities, or desires other than fads, like a
| child. That's fine. Otherwise, there are decades of
| useful experience of large groups of human out there to
| be mined. It can often save you thousands of dollars, but
| then again, that's something only a grown-up cares about.
| waprin wrote:
| Ironic you post this because I just rediscovered a 20yo
| blog post that I remembered reading, re-read it again and
| found it very motivating and inspiring and submitted it.
| haswell wrote:
| I'm somewhere in the middle on this. These communities are
| real, and the value of the content shared by users is real.
|
| On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I
| can't deny the existence and value of these walled gardens.
| The wall doesn't erase the value, even if I strongly prefer
| there wasn't a wall to begin with.
|
| To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise
| questions about the longevity of the content. Most of the
| old web disappeared too.
|
| I think that in order to have any hope of returning to
| something more open and public on a wider scale, it's
| necessary to understand why these communities are thriving
| on discord. I don't have the answer to that question, but I
| suspect that the wall is actually a benefit to some.
| jallmann wrote:
| My Twitter feed has a bunch of people doing extremely niche
| deep dives into Cold War weapons systems. For example, on the
| design of MiG-23 air intakes:
| https://twitter.com/BaA43A3aHY/status/1753715489686057384
| jozzas wrote:
| This is literally the point of the article. That's all posted
| inside the twitter walled garden. Great content, wrong
| platform.
| blazingbanana wrote:
| If you haven't checked out the "Surpise me" button on
| https://wiby.me I strongly suggest you do. These digital
| gardens are still out there even if sadly stuck in time.
| lancesells wrote:
| I've used that button so many times to find things. I wish
| there was another directory that had the same unique feel but
| a bit more modernized. Wiby seems to be only one era or feel.
| jmholla wrote:
| I like Marginalia:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I got some quality issues right now. Kinda works but not
| as well as I'd want.
| Filligree wrote:
| It's gotten famous enough that people have started
| optimizing for it?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Nah, just been working on low level stuff and I haven't
| had the time to do a lot of the manual quality tuning
| that's always been necessary once in a blue moon.
|
| Downside of being a one man show is I only have so much
| attention to spend on tasks, so sometimes quality tuning
| gets a bit neglected.
| ya1sec wrote:
| Gonna plug my project: https://moonjump.app/
|
| I have a keyboard shortcut that opens moonjump.app/jump,
| which will redirect to a random site
| m-i-l wrote:
| As much as I like "digital gardens" and think that they are a
| step in the right direction, rewilding requires much more than
| cultivating lots of isolated patches of ground - the article
| even mentions a nature reserve which was "too small and too
| disconnected to be rewilded. Its effectively landlocked status
| made over-grazing and collapse inevitable".
| Vrondi wrote:
| ...these things still exist. They are not surfaced by search
| engines, because they are too small, and no companies are
| paying the search engines to do so. Most people stay inside
| their social network bubbles and never look at regular websites
| outside them.
| solarpunk wrote:
| my friend has a thing that really fits the vibe of "digital
| gardens" well: https://greenhouse.server.garden/
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| No, we don't. The issue was never and will never be the content,
| it is with the curation and mobility deeply and systemically
| taken over by social media and smart phone makers. If Google
| displays spam and AI generated nonsense, and almost everyone
| relies on it (including those who use "alternative front-ends"),
| then how do you expect anyone to find a healthy internet? Even if
| the "extractive and fragile monoculture" made up 0.001% of the
| internet, it doesn't matter if people can never reach the
| 99.999%.
| digging wrote:
| That's what the article is addressing.
| kristopolous wrote:
| There's lots of these projects already, such as
| https://neocities.org/browse
|
| And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites
| like https://spacehey.com/browse
|
| Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange
| stuff.
|
| They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.
| rumdz wrote:
| I was just about to post neocities, but then got distracted by
| all the cool sites.
| quartesixte wrote:
| >Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of
| strange stuff
|
| I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet
| communities are filled with interesting and fun things again.
| It's just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As
| adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get
| banned outright.
|
| The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on "non-
| mainstream" interests.
|
| Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral
| than the static sites of yore. But they're out there. And they
| thrive.
|
| And 4chan still exists.
|
| The kids will be alright.
| kristopolous wrote:
| yeah, click around the spacehey site. It's a bunch of kids
| 13-18 or so. I had initially thought this site was going to
| be mostly nostalgic people in their 30s and 40s.*
|
| It's fascinating how people born after the decline of myspace
| has found a clone and helped bring it to life.
|
| ---
|
| * maybe it is and a bunch of people are just playing a
| character ... unlikely though.
| katehikes88 wrote:
| sad thing is that you need to provide a phone number just to
| read those telegram and discord groups. 4chan is nothing like
| it used to be. it is run over by bot posts and shills from
| various interest groups. the amount of genuine anon posts is
| quite low.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry for the offtopicness, but trollish usernames aren't
| allowed on HN, so we've banned this account.
|
| If you want to pick a different username, we can rename it
| for you and unban the account, as long as the username is
| genuinely neutral.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comm
| e...
| bsaul wrote:
| friend of mine told me this exactly : going on telegram feels
| like being back to the original internet. But that's probably
| because of all the illegal/uncensored content you can find
| there
| kristopolous wrote:
| ever go to onion sites? They're pretty great. No javascript,
| social media share buttons, ad-tech or click-jacking or
| videos popping up or walls in front of the content. No liking
| or subscribing or logging in with your facebook account...
| it's ironic how tor is the clean internet.
| runjake wrote:
| Which onions sites do you find interesting or useful?
| Timwi wrote:
| While all of what you said is technically true, you left
| out the fact that Tor sites are majority about illegal
| activity, such as hiring assassins, ordering forged
| identity documents, and buying and selling controlled
| substances. I'm afraid that kind of kills the nostalgia for
| me.
| philwelch wrote:
| Half the fun is trying to guess which 40% of those are
| just larping, which 40% are feds, and which 20% are
| actually real.
| wk_end wrote:
| Not to disparage spaces like NeoCities, but to quote the great
| American singer/songwriter David Berman: Punk
| rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead,
| punk's not dead"
|
| That is - these spaces will never quite be the same as what we
| once had, because they're fundamentally nostalgic. The "wild"
| internet was also once the vanguard, the future, and that
| excitement won't be recaptured by going back.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Is it going back or picking up where the other left off?
|
| I think these have inspirational historical bases as opposed
| to being renfairs.
|
| They are in the hands of a younger generation.
| juancn wrote:
| It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over
| the place.
|
| I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet
| truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR.
|
| On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing
| the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning,
| but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet
| were a particularly well educated elite. It was definitely not
| for everyone.
|
| Not everyone was online, what we had was people with disposable
| income to have a computer, usually with some form of college
| education and some technical knowledge.
|
| Then the masses came, and social media thrived.
| digging wrote:
| > It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all
| over the place.
|
| It's nothing like GPT IMO; it's opinionated, for one thing. I
| think it's just hard to follow because it does draw from a
| large variety of sources and ideas and doesn't weave them
| together very smoothly. This is showcased with the horrible
| modern trend of displaying a large quote of something the
| article literally just said, or will say next. This practice is
| always a bad choice, but failure scales with the complexity of
| the article; the author would have done better to use more
| headings, which would help them organize the work.
|
| I do completely agree with your assessment of why the earlier
| internet was... a more rewarding experience. (I don't think
| "better" is a meaningful term here.) But, the article is
| explicitly rejecting the idea of returning to the past, and
| instead building something new that fosters emergent behavior
| and diversity. The goal is empowerment of agents who have a
| will to cultivate their ideas.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| Wilder doesn't necessarily equal more anonymous. I spend a
| lot of time on little forums where I might not know someone's
| irl name but I know who they are.
| mondobe wrote:
| > if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan
|
| I don't think they were referring to moderation in itself.
| 4chan isn't a decentralized platform like the Fediverse
| (AFAIK), so, if it was theoretically large enough (like,
| TikTok-sized), it would be just as big a problem.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| It is surprisingly easy to set up a phpBB forum or some such
| thing, on a tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool, set up a
| nameserver for it, invite a couple of your friends, and start
| your own community, completely disengaged from any major
| corporate shenanigans.
|
| Big things can happen with such a virtual machine.
|
| Even better, you could a mailman server, and get yourself a
| proper mailing-list of like-minded subscribers - _for any subject
| under the sun_ - chatting away on a regular basis.
|
| Fact is, all it takes to set up a decent social network is to do
| some social engineering. Even real, meat-space activities can be
| completely divulged of their toxic mainstream membership in the
| info-spectacle industrial complex, and replaced with a couple
| smart services, on a tightly bound VM, somewhere functional.
|
| Big things happen because of the people, not the technology
| involved...
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Sounds very cool, I am interested in hearing more. I'm not sure
| how well I follow how one could set this up, basically. What
| constitutes a "tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool", what are
| you thinking of here?
|
| And are you saying this could work with a few technically-
| minded friends, or with anyone? It's hard to imagine it working
| with anyone. Not to be a negative Nancy or anything, I wish it
| were possible all the same.
| kristov wrote:
| The barrier to entry for running your own site (something
| dynamic, as opposed to static hosting) is essentially the same
| in 2024 as it was in 2004. Gotta get a domain (and keep it
| registered). Gotta have an SSL cert (letsencrypt makes it
| better). Raspberry pi can run a lot, but getting your consumer
| ISP to give you a static IP is still more money. Definitely
| more VPS options now though. But self hosting your still
| basically looking at the same experience as 20 years ago, with
| slightly better options. Ipv6 had this promise that everyone
| could have mutiple public ips just for themselves, but this
| hasn't really been realized to its potential for some reason.
| We never reached that point where average Joe can run their own
| web presence without relying on some provider or "walled
| garden" owning them. If your average Joe and you want to share
| your thoughts online, best option today is a walled garden. How
| could it be made better? Average Joe can't run mailman, and
| certainly can't run their own mailserver.
| d--b wrote:
| The geocities times weren't THAT cool. We mostly had to go
| through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn't find
| shit.
| gspencley wrote:
| Can we find shit now?
|
| I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's
| not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find
| search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links.
| And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers
| "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of
| the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind
| walled gardens.
|
| I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired
| of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for
| instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to
| be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch
| of results that are about something I don't care about,
| identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the
| "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have
| no effect what-so-ever. Grrr....
|
| I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you
| to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk
| without an account and every single time I've tried to create
| an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days
| because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever
| that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that
| I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the
| suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so
| highly in the search results despite doing everything they can
| to prevent people without accounts from even being able to
| create accounts, let alone browse those results.
|
| The Web is dead.
| krapp wrote:
| I find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me.
|
| I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they
| can never seem to find a single useful result on any search
| engine, ever.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I search for somewhat obscure and highly specific things.
| There are queries which used to reliably return the results
| I was looking for. Over the past several years these
| queries no longer work.
|
| It feels like the search engine used to accept whatever I
| typed and used that to query. The results had to be a good
| match for all the words in my query. This made it very easy
| to find exactly what I was looking for.
|
| Now google feels free to ignore terms from my query or to
| use synonyms instead of the exact term. The results are now
| exceptionally broad and no longer are a good match for the
| specific query I've entered. I now have to use "quotes"
| "around" "every" "single" "term" or go several pages deep
| to find the page I want.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Because they remember the past far more fondly than it was
| and converge the utility they get from the current day with
| the ideals of back then.
|
| The reality is there is far more creative and well produced
| content on the web and closed platforms today than there
| ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find
| it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.
| Gud wrote:
| No, it is not us "remembering the past far more fondly".
| Today Google search results yield the same crap without
| fail.
|
| For example, a search for "how do I repair widget X" will
| inevitable take me to a garbage SEO site following the
| same patterns. The internet is less useful today than it
| was 10 years ago. Probably it peaked 20 years ago, before
| big money completely took over and ruined the place.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| It did not peak 20 years ago. This is laughable rose
| tinted glasses.
|
| Also you can ask almost any LLM model for that type of
| answer and get it instantly and personalized.
| Vrondi wrote:
| ...and you will not know if the answer is accurate or
| where it came from.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| This is outdated. You can source with many modern public
| LLM products now.
|
| Why is hacker news full of so much outdated thinking?
| valicord wrote:
| > I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that
| they can never seem to find a single useful result on any
| search engine, ever.
|
| And they never give specific examples either.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah this one perplexes me too. I won't deny that there's a
| ton of blogspam on Google (or any other search engine), but
| Google is still the best search out there imo. I
| _certainly_ don 't understand people who say they find
| ChatGPT to be superior. Like, what? They don't even fill
| the same role!
| calgoo wrote:
| I have been using DDG for the last 5 years and used google
| the other day after a fresh install, and i find the results
| are just worse (IMHO). Now, you also learn to write
| searches in specific ways depending on the search engine.
| DDG reminds me more of old school search engines (or at
| least it used to). Again, this is just my experience, there
| might also be something with google adapting to your search
| habits if you allow it, but not sure if that exists in
| google search like it does in YT.
| rhdunn wrote:
| Searching e.g. "xq31 curlyarrayconstructor does not use
| enclosedexpr":
|
| 1. In google, I get 9 results, none of which are a
| reference to the W3C XQuery/XPath issue. This is because
| google is actually "helpfully" searching for "xq31 curly
| array constructor does not use enclosed expr" -- telling it
| to not do that finds the issue, returning two results.
|
| 2. In bing, the bug report (bug 29989) is the top result.
|
| 3. In DuckDuckGo, it is also the top result.
|
| I've had other problems searching google for specific error
| messages as it decides to remove quoting, tends to show
| results for space-separated compound identifiers (see the
| "curly array constructor" in what google searches for by
| default), does word stemming, and other "helpful"
| transformations on the search.
| valicord wrote:
| "I had to do an extra click on a clearly labeled link"
| does not equate "search engines are borderline useless"
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Yeah, but music would auto-play in the background, random stuff
| would float across your screen, and your cursor would turn
| into......something.
| xandrius wrote:
| I think it's all nostalgia: I remember it and it was mostly
| crap. What made it super special for me was when I was
| looking at a site made by someone I knew, and I could learn
| more about them through what they made.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| My favorite was an ascii 12 hour clock with hour, minute, and
| second hands rotating about the cursor. Really helped me know
| exactly what time it was while surfing those Freewebs sites!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Geocities was mostly a creative experience, more so than
| something you'd consume. The fun was in participation.
| pupppet wrote:
| Bring back user-curated indexes.
| tmaly wrote:
| I would take these over ad infested search results any day.
| mistermann wrote:
| Makes discovery too easy, and memory holing too hard.
|
| (Conspiratorial/Systems thinking acknowledged.)
|
| https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1778899250857783731
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043297
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption
| nf3 wrote:
| Frankly, I'd much rather tend to my real-life garden than any
| digital metaphor for one. I find it so much more gratifying!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Hardly anyone ever complains that I'm doing it wrong, for
| starters.
| moshun wrote:
| I'm not sure it's a binary choice, blog your garden!
| k310 wrote:
| Wild is good as long as it's not wild as in battlefield. It's not
| like you get diverse opinions; no matter what you post, you get
| warring factions, vulgar insults, and sometimes, death threats.
|
| And bots.
|
| I posted earlier today:
|
| Anil Dash argues [1] that things can be better in not so wide-
| open communities. And then there's someone like
| Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who
| has been patiently toiling away building tools that let others
| build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities --
| the sort that are full of acts of kindness and genuine
| connection, instead of incessant fights about hate speech.
| There's been a huge uptick in interest in Darius' work as
| networks like Twitter have fallen apart, and a new generation
| discovers the joys of an internet that's as intimate and
| connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this hearkens back to
| that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned
| the internet of a generation ago -- sometimes the entire platform
| you were using to talk to others was just being run by one,
| passionate person. We're seeing the biggest return to that human-
| run, personal-scale web that we've witnessed since the turn of
| the millennium, with enough momentum that it's likely that 2024
| is the first year since then that many people have the experience
| of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a
| platform that's being run by a regular person instead of a
| commercial entity. It's going to make a lot of new things
| possible.
|
| [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
| commentary/inte...
|
| I have had ideas for a different internet -- a network of
| networks. Since Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson and Kevin Kelly,
| technology was meant to empower and liberate people. Only a
| handful actually do, as in Wikipedia. People have enormous
| computing power in their computers and mobile devices. It often
| just liberates cash from their pockets.
|
| Time to reinvent. I'll share ideas later.
|
| No need for this crap: [2] Well, things changed
| a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech
| world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old
| problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of
| what's getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to
| undermine workers and control consumers, we're instead seeing
| lots of major players lose power because their signature
| offerings have gotten so much worse. Search engines are becoming
| far more useless as they attempt to chase AI hype and shoehorn in
| less reliable results, even as their legitimate search results
| get cluttered up with AI-generated crap. The most culturally
| influential social network has had its cultural relevance
| destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based
| managemenet style. And the major mobile phone platforms
| overplayed their hand so badly in exerting power over their app
| ecosystems that regulators around the globe have responded by
| prying open these heretofore-closed markets.
|
| [2] https://www.anildash.com//2024/01/03/human-web-renaissance/
|
| Time for a network of networks, not a network of 4 or 5 castles
| surrounded by serfs.
| spxneo wrote:
| No matter what you do, 90/00s internet is never coming back
|
| They demonstrated the ready willingness use of violence by
| special interest groups bankrolling and giving insider trading
| tips to your political leaders. Meanwhile some college student
| torrents some Hollywood movie and gets arrested.
|
| ex) Megaupload
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Smartphones enabled internet addiction to reach the masses.
| Previously it only engaged those who had the patience and wits to
| maintain a PC and sit down at a desk to read and write on the
| internet. As long as the professional and volunteer skills to
| invest in a "wild" project are transferrable to that of a
| centralized platform, creators will gravitate to the side that
| has more users and can pay them more and consumers will gravitate
| toward the one that is easier to access and worth the according
| cost of entry (oftentimes free).
|
| This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any
| subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving
| the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic
| mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and
| leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention
| competition and opportunity cost.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I
| gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There
| are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any
| personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host
| program I find.
|
| I have less than 3k of personal websites.
|
| Data are in the repository.
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
|
| I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is
| interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a
| surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.
|
| This is how I discover real new content on the Internet.
| Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.
| squigz wrote:
| > I have less than 3k of personal websites.
|
| It is _extraordinarily_ difficult for me to believe this is
| indicative of the reality of the entire Internet. I 've
| probably visited a good chunk of this amount of personal sites.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The
| problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard
| in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery
| problem, above all.
| Timwi wrote:
| I agree with you, although I wonder how we found the great
| fascinating wild websites before search engines even existed. I
| remember "web rings" but I don't think that's the whole story.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| We've more or less always had search engines as long as there
| has been a public Internet. But web directories were a thing
| early on too.
| squigz wrote:
| For a long time, search engines weren't nearly as SEO-gamed
| as they are now
| chadsix wrote:
| Self hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet.
|
| If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their
| systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform,
| the forests will thrive again.
| cgh wrote:
| The article is primarily about breaking up certain technology
| companies into their broad constituent parts and mandating
| interoperability, presumably by law. That seems a lot more
| realistic than your average person self-hosting, which almost
| everyone would view as a hassle and a usability fail.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I have the technical capability to host, but I don't want the
| responsibility or want to spend the time. I don't wanna be
| interrupted from my actual work or hobbies to fix up my
| personal hosted stuff.
|
| I just want to let someone or some group handle that for me.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Get shared hosting.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I still have to manage the service or the code. I don't
| wanna worry about software updates.
| logicprog wrote:
| auto updating podman containers.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > federate
|
| But I think the problem quickly turns to over-fragmentation,
| even with something like matrix, mastodon or lemmy today, there
| are so many different instances and many of them are blocking
| several other instances from federating with them, people don't
| know where to go and have too many different places to look for
| stuff that they simply won't even try.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I still don't have a matrix account anywhere because of that.
| Let alone the others. I want my own identity, but I don't
| wanna host a whole server. It'd be cool if fastmail offered
| such a service
| myself248 wrote:
| I already have plenty of hobbies, though -- the ones I want to
| write about on my blog. I don't need self-hosting to be a new
| hobby.
|
| I would love if I could pay a "gardener" to maintain my self-
| hosted stuff. My hardware (that's one hobby!), my bandwidth, my
| choice of non-invasive species (informed by consultation with
| the gardener, which ones they'd like to maintain), but
| ultimately someone else does the planting, the weeding, the
| single sign-on integration, the updates.
| gitgud wrote:
| I wonder if self-hosting away from giant cloud providers like
| AWS, Azure and GCloud would be better for the internet too.
|
| Self host at home should be much more common than it is...
| dangrossman wrote:
| Self-hosting means taking a second job as a sysadmin, applying
| software updates all the time, patching emergency security
| vulnerabilities, hardening services against constant attacks,
| deciding whether the daily "I have found a bug in your system
| and will disclose" mails are legitimate threats. If you fail at
| any of these tasks, relatively new regulations mean various
| governments can fine you more than your net worth over failing
| to report a data breach to the right agency on the right
| timeline. To me, that's what prevents people from standing up
| their own blogs and other services on a home-brew server in
| their house or a $5 VPS these days.
| logicprog wrote:
| > Self-hosting means taking a second job as a sysadmin
|
| True, in the literal sense that you will have to administrate
| your own system, but I'm sure there must be ways to make this
| easier for people. Perhaps small computers that come pre-
| configured with the correct specifications for being a good
| small-scale server and pre-installed with software that
| provides a simple web GUI dashboard that you can just drop
| files on and it will serve them up for you, with everything
| else taken care of under the hood.
|
| > applying software updates all the time
|
| With image based distros, containers, and their respective
| auto-updating schemes, this -- and the concomitant problems
| updates may bring given the extensive and hairy state of most
| systems -- should hopefully become a thing of the past.
|
| > patching emergency security vulnerabilities
|
| I mean, unless you are running something that is incredibly
| visible online and linked to you from a lot of places or used
| by a lot of people and so you need to take extreme extra
| security steps, shouldn't this be taken care of by just
| regularly updating your software? For a small scale self-
| hosted blog or personal email server this seems a hardly
| proportional.
|
| > hardening services against constant attacks
|
| Again, it seems like you are projecting the requirements of a
| much larger scale endeavor onto small-scale personal self
| hosting of a blog or email server only you use. And to the
| degree that system hardening is necessary for a small cell
| posted system, once again image-based operating systems with
| hardened Pam authentication rules that run everything in
| rootless podman containers and keep SELinux enabled should be
| more than hard enough and all that can be configured and set
| up upstream to the user.
|
| > deciding whether the daily "I have found a bug in your
| system and will disclose" mails are legitimate threats
|
| What are you even talking about here? For the third time, it
| seems like you are projecting the requirements of a much
| larger scale thing onto small-scale personal self hosting.
|
| > If you fail at any of these tasks, relatively new
| regulations mean various governments can fine you more than
| your net worth over failing to report a data breach to the
| right agency on the right timeline
|
| A data breach? On a small self-hosted blog or email server?
| Who's data would those regulations be punishing you for
| leaking, your own, maybe two freinds'? And those regulations,
| if you are speaking about the ones in the EU that I am
| thinking of, have pretty clear cut offs and requirements and
| stuff that really wouldn't apply to someone's little self-
| hosted thing.
| dangrossman wrote:
| > A data breach? On a small self-hosted blog or email
| server? Who's data would those regulations be punishing you
| for leaking, your own, maybe two freinds'?
|
| Say you host your own WordPress blog with comments enabled.
| A few of your posts get to the front page of Hacker News,
| and you collect a couple hundred comments from California
| techies. Your WordPress instance is breached because you
| didn't patch a zero day vulnerability quickly enough. You
| have to personally notify every California resident of the
| breach, and California's Attorney General.
|
| Government regulation means that part of your job in self-
| hosting a simple blog is knowing that CCPA exists, along
| with every similar regulation passed by every other state,
| now and into the future.
|
| Worse, you may not even realize you're holding regulated
| "personal data" and how much. Maybe you try to avoid this
| liability by turning off comments and uploads, but you
| don't realize your web server has access logs enabled, and
| some state or country considers this personal data as well.
| GDPR does for one.
| squigz wrote:
| > You have to personally notify every California resident
| of the breach, and California's Attorney General.
|
| And if one doesn't?
| dangrossman wrote:
| The state can get an injunction against you, fine you,
| and in some situations creates a private cause of action
| for the people whose information was breached to
| individually sue you with statutory damages available.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm in Canada. Can they still do that?
| j-bos wrote:
| Do those laws apply even if you charge no fees and serve
| no ads?
| Vrondi wrote:
| The easy solution is to just not enable comments. Nobody
| has an account on my site but me. I'm endangering
| nobody's data but mine. No worries.
| telmo wrote:
| Come on now. Can you point to one single case of
| something close to this scenario having happened in real
| life to a small self-hosted WordPress blog? Or even a big
| one? Governments are not that stupid, they are not that
| malicious and they do not have infinite resources to
| pursue such frivolous and nonsensical activities. This
| reads like some weird sort of paranoid legal fanfic.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > Perhaps small computers that come pre-configured with the
| correct specifications for being a good small-scale server
|
| Great minds think alike. See FreedomBox[1] for a totally
| FOSS implementation of that idea; one of my friends runs
| all of his internet services at home with it: email, file
| storage, contacts synchronisation etc.
|
| [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Vaguely sensible initial setup (doable from a template or
| script) and automatic updates (enable these from a script)
| solves like 99% of this problem.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I personally am more interested in micro-hosting services like
| omg.lol[1]. I do self host a few services, but they are
| generally on VPNs that have smaller attack surfaces. I don't
| think it's practical for most individuals to maintain secure
| web servers, but I think most people can pay a very small
| amount of money to get most of the benefit.
|
| [1] https://home.omg.lol/
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| I think internet was way awesome before digital advertising era.
| There should be areas of internet which should try to replicate
| the early internet i.e text-only design, bring back forums and no
| advertising revenue.
| efields wrote:
| I'm pessimistic about the likelihood of any new "wild" internet
| ecologies thriving the way they did in the past.
|
| If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its
| most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to
| explore.
|
| There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities
| still abound. But idk... I wonder if a generation lost in
| cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy
| with the internet writ large.
|
| Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
| SamBam wrote:
| > If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to
| its most logical extreme already.
|
| I think this is an odd framing. It's not about pushing things
| to further extremes, it's about using all these mediums that
| have been allowed to wither and die. It's about getting out of
| the sterile high-walled gardens.
| statquontrarian wrote:
| I like:
|
| 1. The Neocities random page:
| https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random
|
| 2. The Neocities recently updated page:
| https://neocities.org/activity
|
| 3. Status Cafe: https://status.cafe/
|
| 4. The MidnightPub: https://midnight.pub/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's a nice essay but like so many in this space, it's really
| missing a key force that encourages consolidation, fights
| diversification, and pushes companies to centralize as much as
| they can into as few services as possible:
|
| Users.
|
| Users demonstrate, by their behavior, again and again, that they
| want simple, they want turnkey, they want inter-operation, and
| they want stability. And the big corps generally succeed in
| providing those things. Web 1.0 and most of Web 2.0 was none of
| those things.
|
| The easiest way to engineer those goals is to consolidate.
| Consolidated software developed under one roof can use incentive
| of money to induce engineers to figure out the "grimy" problems
| to make pieces of the tooling work with each other (such as GMail
| interoperating with Docs, or Facebook Messenger and Facebook
| itself). And the centralized dev houses force consolidation; for
| all the jokes (justifiable) about Google having too many chat
| options, how does it compare to the world outside their garden?
| How many people actually go through the hassle to get XMPP inter-
| operating, since Google dropping support for it didn't mean it
| actually went away? Not enough. A consolidated dev house doesn't
| have to have multiple competing social network platforms or image
| hosts, etc... They can maintain one, maybe float the occasional
| experiment, and users don't have to worry too much about change.
|
| Users actually hate many kinds of change because they build their
| lives atop the predictability of systems they don't control and
| they get angry when those systems are altered without their
| consent. And to head off the argument "But the FAANGs change shit
| all the time..." They sure do. Now compare that rate of churn to
| the rate of churn of how one stands up a web server, or how many
| non-FAANG online services have come up, run out of money, and
| evaporated.
|
| Inter-operation, at first glance, is the thing the walled gardens
| fight against. But ironically, by consolidating to one solution
| and letting just about everyone on the internet use it, they
| create an "interior inter-operation" to rival the inter-operation
| you can get with diverse solutions. Consider how much of Twitter
| you see doing a Twitter search vs. a Mastodon search, or how easy
| it is to find your coworkers on LinkedIn vs. finding (and using,
| successfully, through their spam filters) their email addresses.
| The single-service, one-API, few-clients model consolidates
| multiple things that users don't want multiple _of_... chat
| clients, search corpuses, histories, administration stories,
| username / password combinations, privacy policies. And this all
| carries consequences (get locked out for legitimate or
| illegitimate reasons and you're now locked out of a _very_ big
| garden), but they 're consequences that hit the few; for the near
| totality, "it just works."
|
| Regarding stability: Google has been around a quarter of a
| century at this point. Facebook about two decades. They may not
| last forever, but users understandably are more likely to stick
| with them than to try new things. Every new thing is more likely
| to be a pets-dot-com than the next Amazon, and who has time to
| build familiarity with someone's bespoke solution just to get
| that inevitable "We never hoped to have to send this message..."
| turndown email?
|
| And this all culminates in the lack of proliferation of browsers,
| because the browser enables all these features and, at the end of
| the day, no user (rounding for error) _wants_ to run two or more
| browsers and no web developer (rounding for error) _wants_ to
| accomodate the undocumented implementation quirks of two or more
| browsers (quirks that always exist no matter how spec-compliant
| they are... If they didn 't exist, _they 'd be the same
| browser_). So there's the occasional cry of "Why aren't there
| dozens of browsers" without anyone really answering who _wants_
| that?
|
| Nothing about a "rewilded" net is impossible, but users don't
| want to do it and don't really want to use it. Not nearly enough
| to make it into something as big as the consolidated service
| providers. It's a nice hobby for people who really care about how
| the machinery works to dabble in (I, too, run a Mastodon
| node...), but I don't see anything pushing people out of their
| Facebooks, their Amazons, or their Googles, in the near future.
|
| Not if the alternative is for regular users to have to do more
| work than they do today.
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| Would agree.
| kderbyma wrote:
| "The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless
| truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the
| devastating consequences sometimes aren't obvious until it's too
| late."
|
| I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it
| should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary
| complexity
| mikewarot wrote:
| There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the
| internet for a year without updates and/or active management.
| Until this becomes possible, and widespread, the idea of self-
| hosting is going to remain niche.
|
| Furthermore, because no browser is totally secure, users are
| going to avoid non-popular links, perpetuating the walled gardens
| they already use.
|
| I fear our monoculture of operating systems has to be addressed
| first, before any of the rest can really take hold.
| wswope wrote:
| Where's that idea coming from?
|
| I'd wager >95% of LTS linux distributions released in the past
| ten years are still rock-solid if you're just exposing 22, 80,
| and 443. Even PHP5 is still de facto bulletproof if you're
| paranoid about not trusting user input.
|
| Vulns don't come out of nowhere.
| squigz wrote:
| > monoculture of operating systems
|
| There are several widely-used OS, one of which (Linux) has
| plenty of very different versions depending on your usecase.
| I'm not really sure that counts as a "monoculture"
| peppertree wrote:
| Truth is with LLM and chat as main interface, it's going to be
| harder and harder for niche sites to be surfaced.
| web-cowboy wrote:
| I wanted Tim Berners-Lee's "Solid" project to be at least a
| partial foundation for this, but it doesn't seem to be getting
| traction.
|
| Some way to "self-host" or "own my own data" isn't very possible
| in a world of complex system administration and cloud providers,
| GDPR/Privacy, etc.
|
| Maybe solving this problem (via FOSS, hopefully) and giving
| people their own internet-in-a-kit could be a good way to go?
|
| Are there active projects like this? Is it even feasible?
| thesagan wrote:
| The Internet is not Detroit, but like Detroit it expanded very
| very fast and was very very innovative and open. Then it
| consolidated, which is ongoing. Things settled... for a while.
| The early days of Detroit saw hundreds of little innovative
| experimental companies that over time became the big three. The
| rest is history. Detroit is the victim of its own invention.
|
| Luckily my analogy isn't a very good one, the Internet is nothing
| like Detroit. It is, however, interesting how quickly wild things
| can be tamed, and that may beckon a cautionary lesson.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>"...a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we
| destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren't
| obvious until it's too late."
|
| This a thousand times over. This should be taught in schools and
| repeated from the earliest grades to post-grad. It bears
| repetition, sufficient that it is seen by everyone as obvious.
| Then, perhaps the society will value complexity and diversity as
| the true strengths that they are. Homogenizing and monoculture
| will kill us all, whether it is forestry, agriculture, human
| cultures, economies, the internet, or mil or corporate orgs.
| Uniformity is brittleness.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| This is a great article, but it's missing the elephant in the
| room: copyright.
|
| There's a reason that our society has allowed <10 companies to
| own the internet: the internet is _content_. Anyone who can claim
| to "own" content has the _right_ to monopolize it. We didn 't
| simply _allow_ corporations to build walls of garden around us:
| we enshrined those walls as _a legal right_!
|
| This article opens with a great metaphor, comparing the internet
| to a forest. Let's continue that metaphor, and see how copyright
| fits in. What is a tree made of? Content. Copyright doesn't
| simply give someone ownership of their garden, it gives them
| ownership of _entire species_. Want to grow an Apple tree? Too
| bad: you don 't have the _right_ to copy Apple 's species. Want
| to pollinate your gnu tree with an Apple tree? No can do: Apple
| trees were intentionally designed to be incompatible with free
| range bees.
|
| Every thing we do on the internet is carefully managed with
| contracts centered around copyright. Giant corporations own
| nearly all the copy rights. Is it any surprise that they write
| all the contracts?
|
| We need to rewild the internet; and to do that, we (and our
| peers) will need seeds.
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